BY DAN

By the time you’re reading this, you’ll already know about the latest batch of rule changes the NRL has suggested after the season has already started. Anthony Abdo, rugby league’s Waylon Smithers, has been wheeled out to justify their process, suggesting four new changes midway through the period teams normally use to adjust to them. The changes include:

• giving the scoring team the choice of kicking or receiving
• expanding the interchange bench to six players (with the same number of interchanges)
• removing the seven‑tackle set from try‑scoring restarts
• extending set‑restart eligibility to 80 per cent of the field

These are significant. Dropping them in the middle of the pre‑season reflects a back to front process. These decisions shape rosters, require trialing, and demand tactical adjustment – the kind of work clubs should be given time to prepare for, not have dumped on the floor of a billion‑dollar sport. If this is business as usual, it needs fixing. Clubs are being asked to provide feedback, meaning we’ll be in mid January before anything is confirmed. Four weeks before the season starts, you’re changing the rules? The urgency is the point. If the rules upset us, we’ll talk about them more.

As for the recommendations themselves, they range from not a bad idea (removing the seven‑tackle set from try‑scoring restarts), to intriguing (the interchange tweak), to silly (the kick‑off rule), to downright damaging (the six‑again expansion).

Extending the reach of set restarts is so potentially destructive, so likely to have an outsized impact beyond merely “speeding the game up,” that these pages are willing to take V’landys’ bait.

We have literal tape of how terrible this is. The last time the six‑again rule was expanded, it sent the sport into hyperdrive – an unskilled mess of one‑out runs, tries scored around the ruck by outside backs sprinting into A‑gaps, and fatigue as the only tactic. Entire archetypes of players saw their careers evaporate. Scores bloated. Margins widened. The “haves” weaponised the rule to crush competitiveness, cynically conceding early six‑agains to trap opponents in their own end while resetting their defensive line.

The product became so bad that everyone agreed the rule needed winding back. The only reason it wasn’t removed entirely was presumably because broadcasters — the same ones who think people want to watch grade cricketers hit sixes instead of five days of Test cricket — were hot for points, baby. The idea we need more ‘speed’ in the game is one that only exists in the backwards minds of administrators.

And yet here we are again, staring down another bad idea, at worst to reshape the game in the image of points and boredom. Are they so cynical they’d gin up anger for engagement? Are they so foolish they’d pursue a rule we have two seasons of evidence against? When tasked with custodianship of the sport, are they really so shortsighted they’d risk organisational legitimacy, player safety, product quality, and a century of goodwill just to own a media cycle – or appease a handshake in a blue suit? Are they hoping the clubs will be the ones to save us from this idiotic pathway?

I don’t know, and I don’t know if these rules will hold. But I know that if the set‑restart rule is extended, the game will be worse. We’ve seen it before. So have you. Rugby league deserves more than this. But we seem to be led by people more interested in delivering for broadcasters than fans. More interested in dabbling with change to chase the media cycle than improving the sport. More interested in change for change’s sake than protecting the game that has given them careers, paychecks, and the undeserved goodwill of many.

Rugby league is at risk, again. It only needs a caring hand to help it thrive. But the people in charge of its care keep turning toward the cameras instead.

The game will survive this moment. It always does. But it won’t be because of them.

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